Tell versus Show

[campylobacter]

TELL style:

Before the phone rang, Mulder had been pondering feelings and feeling pondersome, because he was trying to figure out why he was perplexed. Was it the strange twist in the plot? Was it in reaction to dialogue with another character? Was it the way the Author liked to drone on and on about every piece of minutiae, reinforcing every point, making sure that the Reader jumped to no conclusions or suffered from no cognitive disconnects?

No, thought Mulder. It couldn't be. Why the excess of rhetorical questions, when they only introduce rhetorical answers? Perhaps it was the Author documenting her own thought processes.

Abandoning the Reader to succinct, streamlined descriptions of events would lack style, because after all, many words indicate a large vocabulary.

Trusting the Reader to formulate her own theories about an unexplained narrative twist courted the possibility of the Author being misunderstood.

And the horrifying prospect of allowing the Reader to fill in the subtextual blanks would only free the Author to play with symbolism, allegory, overtone, theme, and motif. Crafting subtle, relevant detail took more skill and editorial courage than writing the first thing that came to mind. Aggrandizing the text with restatements of previously mentioned ideas ensured that the Reader was carried along on a numbing stream of redundancy, released from the tedious chore of thinking.

The phone rang at the exact moment of his ephiphany: the conclusion that he was somehow trapped inside a story that was ten times longer than necessary. Mulder prepared himself to clarify, articulate, discuss and analyze with other characters -- and with his internal voice -- every motivation, emotion, and impulse flitting through his mind.

SHOW style:

The sudden jangle of the phone interrupted Mulder's unspoken anxieties, causing him a nanosecond of startlement.

. . . .

I prefer the Show style. So sue me.

Comments

[deslea.livejournal.com]

I think there's room for both, but it depends how it's done. There's "enough" tell, and then there's "beat you over the head to the point of catatonia" tell. Of course, it's not an easy balance - I've fallen foul of it myself. My advice to a developing writer would be to start with show, then gradually incorporate tell, rather than vice-versa. But I think people tend to start out the other way around because they perceive it as easier and/or quicker.

</overbearingly serious commentary>

That said, regarding this:

It couldn't be. Why the excess of rhetorical questions, when they only introduce rhetorical answers? Perhaps it was the Author documenting her own thought processes.

Bwaah. Methinks you have read one of the most recent offerings by the author known in my journal as Jane Doe.

Rhetorical reply

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

There's "enough" tell, and then there's "beat you over the head to the point of catatonia" tell.

I was catatonic. The horse was beginning to attract flies. Unfortunately, my rant didn't quite capture the redundancy of the style I despise.

Bwaah. Methinks you have read one of the most recent offerings by the author known in my journal as Jane Doe.

Jane Doe? Ha! I call her Fluffy McRetard.

By the way, it's wasn't Fluffy's fic that set me off. Let's just say it was a reading assignment, to protect the innocent (it was the author's first). I needed to vent about the "readers can't think" Tell style in general without bashing anyone in particular, because I wasn't aiming at a specific author.